"As quiet as a mouse."

Well, we have a mouse in our house.

I discovered the little fetcher last night, just before bed. Considering how cold it's gotten recently, this isn't a huge surprise. It IS however, a surprise that he's made his way up to the third floor of the house, when there are two perfectly salvageable floors before ours. (And the business on the first floor is closed for most of the evening, giving him the run of the place.) So, I have no idea what brought him to the third floor.

I ran into him, right around midnight, when I was heading to bed. He ran quickly around the corner of the kitchen and into my bedroom. A tiny, black flash of fur. I knew exactly what I was looking at. I walked to Joe's room, where he was still up, watching tv on his laptop.

"Hey man, I just saw a mouse." I said.

"Really? Where?" he answered.

"It just ran into my room, from the kitchen."

"That sucks, dude." he said.

"Yeah, well, we're going to have to do something about this. We can't have mice in our apartment. I'll get some traps for him today, but we've got to be VERY aware, in the next few weeks about leaving food out. (Something Joe does.) If we don't deal with this, we won't have A MOUSE, we'll have MANY MICE and I can't live like that, dude."

"That's cool. That's cool," he said. "Get the trap and we'll take care of it." And I knew from the sound of his computer coming back on, that he was going back to watching tv. But I was thinking about his room. And all the shit that he leaves on the floors constantly. If a mouse got into there, you'd LITERALLY never see it. Much less be able to capture or kill it. That was another one of the messages that I wanted to send to Joe, but I guess he wasn't interested in hearing it.

I went back to my room and began disassembling it, to cut down on the mouse's hiding spots. I picked up and bagged the last of the dirty laundry. I put my makeup kit up. I packed up my luggage. I put the laundry basket up on my dresser and I put my nighttable in the kitchen. When I was done, the floor was spotless and the hiding spots were eliminated down to just three. Behind the dresser (which was too heavy to move), behind the tv and tv stand (same reason) and what I like to call the Mouse Highway, around my bed. The molding of my bedroom makes a perfect, mouse-sized highway, completely un-obstructed around the perimeter of the bed. It's no wonder that the mouse ducked in there when he made his break for it. It's perfectly mouse-shaped. Also, the radiator connects the dresser to the tv area, so a mouse has a couple places to hide over in that area.

I took a stick and rattled it around in all of the hiding places. I pulled my bed out and made sure that the little bastard wasn't hiding back there, either. I did everything that I could, to draw him out, but never saw any sign of him. So, it was that I was sitting on my bed, re-thinking the situation when he came out.

He made a crazy dash across my bedroom floor to the corner of my dresser, where the makeup kit used to be. When he saw that it wasn't there anymore, he JUMPED UP against the dresser and then turned back, dashing back for the safety of the tv area. This was a lunatic mouse.

Next to me, on the bed, Maggie quietly snored. Unaware and uninterested in any sort of mouse activity. I roused her and pushed her over onto the floor. She made a half-hearted effort to get back up onto the bed, but when I didn't let her, she snorted at me in annoyance and left to go sleep in the living room. Some mouser, eh?

I put my bed back into place and tried to go back to sleep. Every hour or so, I would wake up, CONVINCED that I'd just heard the mouse. I was obsessed and terrified with the idea that he was going to run across my face. Which would've meant that it was "Scream Bloody Murder" time. But that never happened. Needless to say, I slept fitfully all night long.

This morning, I mouse-proofed the kitchen. I put Maggies food up on a counter and cleaned any foodstuff off the bottom two shelves of the kitchen. I also gave the floor a sweeping, getting rid of any tiny food bits that might've been around the trashcan or the floor. Tonight, I'll set a trap for the little bastard and God Willing, send him to mouse heaven, by the end of the weekend.

I think that we don't have "Mice" right now, because this literally is the first that I've seen of this. And I've checked the door to the back porch (I suspect that as his point of entry.) And the door fits tightly in the frame. If he got in, it was at a time when we left the door open (for Joe to go smoke on the back porch). Also, this mouse didn't know the layout of my room, yet. He was making crazy, mad dashes across my bedroom because he didn't know where he was or what was going on. So, I don't think that he's been there for very long.

Additionally, as lazy as she was on Thursday night, Maggie LOVES to chase anything small and mousey. I've seen her catch one in the backyard, by dashing after it and chasing it along a fence row. Once she sees the target, she locks onto it and tracks it down. If she had seen the mouse (and she's been home all day, most days), she'd be a nervous wreck. Hiding in the bedroom, watching for and waiting to catch the mouse. The fact that she's NOT on high alert, tells me that the mouse is a new development.

So, I've done some research this morning on traps and I know what to pick and where and what to bait it with. I know precisely where I can place the trap to capture/kill the mouse (but not my dog). And I think that if we can get him pretty soon, we can minimalize the mouse feces, the property destruction and the chance of a full blown infestation. Also, eradicating this guy would completely protect me from "Mouse Running Across My Face" time and that's a worthy goal.

Baiting the trap,
Mr.B